


Strain

by justheretobreakthings



Series: Prompt Meme Fills [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Keith (Voltron) Whump, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Who even cares I sure don't, Whump, just whump, that's literally all it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 08:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14445309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justheretobreakthings/pseuds/justheretobreakthings
Summary: After being captured on a paladin mission, Keith waits for a rescue from the team; if he doesn't get one, well, then he'll just have to do it himself.(Alternate summary: extremely gratuitous Keith Suffering because yeh)





	Strain

It was a relief for the door of his cell to finally open, even if the figure who entered wasn’t exactly a welcome visitor. Keith had been alone in the penetrating silence of the clammy prison cell for what must have been several vargas at least; normally, such a thing wouldn’t have been much more than an annoyance, but considering that the powerfully-built Irverians who had brought him here in the first place had also taken the time to bind him by the wrists to the metal hooks at the back wall of the cell, the ordeal was marginally more difficult to endure. Besides the roughness of the rope fibers and the grainy, sandpaper-like wall his back and head were up against, he had also lost most of the feeling in his arms long ago, and had a feeling that they were going to be sore for days.

Still, the monotony was starting to get to him almost as much as his uncomfortable position against the wall, so the appearance of the stern and stony Irverian who entered the cell was at least a reprieve from that. Keith didn’t recognize this one, but his military-esque uniform was more elaborate than those of the Irverians who had ambushed him in the first place, decorated with stripes and epaulettes, so he figured this was a higher-up, perhaps a warden of some sort.

Keith watched the alien steadily as he approached him, and he drew close enough to Keith’s face that he could smell his breath before finally speaking, in a low and gravelly rumble, “I have a few questions for you, Paladin.”

Keith had to hold back a groan. Of course. He should have been expecting that. He had been the only non-civilian present at the depot that had been raided, and thus the only one of the few who had been taken down who was likely to have much useful information about the elaborate network Voltron had implemented to smuggle Irverian citizens off their planet right under the noses of their Galra-puppeteered government.

He had _told_ the others that he didn’t think the depot was well-hidden enough to be such an important way station for the escapees, but had been shot down with arguments about the depot’s ideal location and storage capacity. He couldn’t wait to start tossing out the I-told-you-sos as soon as he was out of here.

And he was going to get out of here. If the other paladins had noticed by now that he was missing, then there no doubt was a rescue being put together right now, and if not, well, he’d gotten out of difficult situations on his own before, and he could do it again.

He met the warden’s hard stare, face schooled into a bored expression. Time to see how this planet handled interrogation. “Questions about what?” he asked, as casually as if the two of them were having this conversation over lunch at a diner rather than in a dank prison cell.

“You  _know_  what about,” the warden growled.

“Refresh my memory.”

The alien slammed its hand up against the wall beside Keith’s head; a heavy thunk when the hand connected suggested that the hand wasn’t empty, and a quick glance to the side told Keith that he was carrying some sort of nightstick. He would have to keep an eye on that. “About the citizens that you and your  _friends_  have been abducting from our planet, that’s what about.”

“Ah. That.”

“Yes,  _that_.”

Keith took a deep breath through his nose. “Afraid I can’t help you. I don’t know a thing.”

With another low growl, the warden moved his hand away from the wall to grab and yank Keith forward at the chest, wrapping his hand into the underarmor. Keith reminded himself that he would need to figure out where they’d put his actual armor before he left. “There’s no good in lying to me, boy,” the alien said. “You can’t know nothing. You were moving your abductees through that depot; where were you taking them? What was the next stop?”

Keith leveled a steady stare at the warden for a moment before answering, “The hiding spot.”

“What hiding spot?”

“Haven’t you noticed? We’ve been stuffing all the refugees up your a–  _agh!”_

He was cut off when the little blunt weapon he’d pegged as a nightstick came swinging into his gut, the blow knocking the breath out of him. It was harder than he had expected, metal rather than wood, leaving him feeling like he’d been struck with an aluminum bat. He took several deep breaths, taking care not to wince at the sting in his side whenever he inhaled. It was nothing. He’d certainly taken worse hits before.

As he brought his slow breaths to a steady pace, he brought his head back up to face the alien again, glaring now rather than keeping his face impassive. “So, what, you’re just going to whack me around with that thing until I sing? Real creative.”

The warden’s expression didn’t change. He simply hefted the nightstick in his hands and asked again, “Where were you taking them?”

“I don’t know,” Keith answered. He bit back a squeak of pain as he took another blow, this time higher up on his chest, near the sternum. The second blow had actually seemed stronger than the first, hurt worse. Maybe this guy was still getting warmed up.

He forced himself not to think about that.

The alien asked again, and again was rebuffed, and this time the weapon struck Keith’s left arm, right at the elbow. The yelp he tried to muffle didn’t quite drown out the crack that accompanied the sudden fire shooting up and down his arm. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth around his low, gasping breaths. Okay, so his arm was broken. He’d had broken bones before. One quick trip to the cryopod would clear that up in no time. Nothing he couldn’t handle. And the blood starting to trickle down his arm from where the skin at his elbow had broken open would leave nothing more than a scab.

A different question next. “How have you been transporting them, and how has it gone undetected?”

“Dunno,” Keith grunted. “Guess you just haven’t been watching close enough.”

The nightstick went for his right knee, and this time he couldn’t keep himself from letting out a full shout of pain. His feet had barely been touching the ground anyway with his arms strung up the way they were, and he had to strain to shift his weight to his left leg, which shook as he held himself upright. Shattered kneecap. Worse than a broken arm. But as long as he got into a cryopod in a decent amount of time, it was still fixable. At least, he was pretty sure it was.

“Which Irverians did you work with to plan these escapes?”

“None of them.” A sharp blow to his ribcage that left him nauseous. It was fine. Ribs could be fixed up easy, and he was pretty sure he would notice if any organ had been damaged from the blow. Nothing to worry about.

“The other paladins, where are they positioned?”

“Nowhere.” This time the alien swung high, catching Keith in the forehead, and he saw stars as his head slammed into the rough wall behind him. He groaned, trying to get his vision back into focus and maintain the gaze he’d held with the warden, but admittedly it was getting harder to hold his head up, especially now with the throbbing in his skull. In fact, the sites on his body where the nightstick had struck were all pulsing painfully, like they were pumping fire through him.

It was possible that maybe he  _did_  have something to worry about after all.

Not that that was going to do him much good now. He met the warden’s eyes, hoping that his own didn’t reveal how much pain he was actually in right now; he didn’t need his tough front to break down right in front of the warden. “What do you think you’re going to accomplish, huh?” he asked, voice strained and breathy from the effort of breathing through his injured chest. “Doesn’t matter how many times you hit me with that thing; if you think I’m gonna rat anyone out to you, you’re insane.”

“Oh, you will,” the alien said calmly. “They always do.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything.”

One last time the alien raised that damned nightstick, and struck Keith clean across the face. He let out a shout of pain as he felt his nose shatter and his lip split under the force of it. A quick test of his jaw told him that it, at least, wasn’t broken, but he was pretty sure a tooth had been loosened.

“You’re only hurting yourself, you know,” the warden said in a low voice over Keith’s rough and gasping breaths. “All I need is a few answers. You’re going to give them to me eventually, so why drag this out?”

“Go to Hell,” Keith growled. The words were garbled somewhat since he was trying to speak through his aching jaw, but the tone came across perfectly.

Perhaps that was unfortunate, since next thing Keith knew, he was being grabbed roughly by the chin and yanked forward as close to the alien as he could get with his wrists still bound to the wall as they were, and he let out an involuntary whimper of pain at the aggravation to his injuries.

“I’m giving you a chance here, paladin. You tell me what I need to know, and we end this now, get you cleaned up and treated, and go our separate ways.” Keith only blinked up at him – both in response to the proposition, and in an attempt to clear away some of the blood that had dripped into his eye from his forehead. “All right,” the alien continued after several ticks of getting no answer. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to wait.”

He let go of Keith’s chin, letting him sag back against the wall, and turned around, exiting the cell with a purposeful stride and slamming the door shut behind him before locking it. “When you’re ready to talk,” he said through the bars that made up one of the cell’s walls, “I’ll be ready to listen. Until then, paladin.” And with that, he moved out of sight and left Keith back in that eerie silence.

Now that he was alone, Keith finally let his demeanor fall entirely, sagging against the wall – and trying not to think about the way doing so jarred his broken arm – with a long, loud moan and dropping his eyes closed, denying ardently to himself that they were watering. He really was in it deep this time, wasn’t he.

Cautiously he shifted his weight on his feet, hissing at the bolt of pain that shot up from his kneecap. He wanted to smack the version of himself from half a varga ago who had thought he was sore and uncomfortable  _then_. That had been nothing, nothing compared to now. Every breath was painful, every tiny motion of his body sending pain spiking through him again. It was as if each spot where he’d been struck had a knife embedded into it.

His head was swimming again, and he wasn’t sure how much of his current nausea was from that, and how much was from the blows he’d taken to his stomach; in any case, it left him feeling disoriented and exhausted.

How long was he going to be stuck like this? He didn’t think any of his injuries were life-threatening, but that didn’t mean he was looking forward to staying here trussed up against the cell wall for who knows how long until a rescue was staged. Nor could he remember how fresh a wound had to be for a cryopod to be able to fix it up without any scarring or other permanent damage.

God, he needed to get out of here.

His mind flickered back to what the warden had said before leaving. He wanted information. Keith couldn’t lie or bluff worth a damn – Shiro had gotten a lot of glee out of that fact when he’d first taught Keith to play poker – and even if he tried it, the Irverian higher-ups the information would go to would surely check to verify it before letting him go, and he’d have Hell to pay for wasting their time with a goose chase. Maybe there was some information he could give that wouldn’t actually harm anything. He was ninety percent sure one of the way stations Voltron had set up hadn’t seen use, so maybe if he rolled the dice on it…

Immediately he cursed himself with every horrible name in his lexicon for entertaining the thought even for a moment. Ninety percent sure was still a ten percent chance that he would be delivering vulnerable civilians into the hands of their oppressors on a silver platter, and for what? So he could get some injuries fixed and not have to face getting beaten up again? Assuming that the warden even stuck to his word.

Selfish, that’s what it was. Selfish as Hell. Just the fact that he had considered it for a fleeting moment suddenly made this whole situation feel much more deserved.

He wasn’t going to tell them a thing… and now he just had to wait on the consequences.

He let out a pained sigh and resigned himself to the waiting. It was worse now than it had been before. This silence had been terrible, yes, but at least he didn’t have to listen to his own rasping breaths or the ringing in his ears that came and went along with the fog in his head. There was also a slow, soft, steady dripping sound that he couldn’t place until one point when he finally opened his eyes to narrow slits and noticed the tiny crimson puddle gathering near his feet from the drops of blood leaking steadily from the gash in his head. That’s right, he’d forgotten; head wounds tend to bleed a lot.

For what might have been just a dobosh and what might have been vargas on end – his internal clock didn’t seem to be functioning the way it was supposed to – he pushed everything else from his mind besides the puddle on the ground and the rhythmic dripping of blood, letting it lull him into as close to a peaceful state as he could get in his predicament.

At one point, he must have drifted out of consciousness, since when the fog cleared he saw that the little puddle had blackened from drying and that the dripping had stopped, the blood from the gash having coagulated into an irritating stickiness on his face. That was also when he noticed that not only the blood had dried; his rough and heavy breaths had left his throat feeling arid and worn.

Occasionally Keith could hear distant footfalls in a nearby hall that indicated that someone else – probably guards or something – was nearby, so he waited for the next time the footsteps came around to call out, ignoring the pain in his jaw and lip, “Hello? Could I get some help?”

He was, surely by a stroke of luck, successful. The footsteps paused, and when they started again, they got gradually louder as they approached the cell. Finally an Irverian guard was in his sights, peering in at Keith through the bars. “What?” he grunted.

“I’m thirsty,” Keith said.

“You gonna answer the chief’s questions?”

Oh. Chief, not warden. Well, he had been close, and it’s not like it made any difference to him either way. “No, I – I need water.”

“And?”

Keith frowned, blinking warily at the guard. “And… can I get some?”

The guard shook his head. “You want a treat, you answer questions.”

Keith stared as he processed the words. So, when that other Irverian had said he’d listen once Keith was ready to talk, he had meant that that was the  _only_  thing he’d listen to? He wasn’t sure how long it had been since last he’d had water. It certainly felt like days, but that was more because time had been moving at a crawl since the moment he’d been tossed into this stupid cell. Still, he’d lost a fair bit of blood, and he’d been sweating, and he wasn’t sure how much that would affect the speed at which dehydration would set in. “So,” he said slowly, “If I don’t talk, I don’t even get water?”

The guard nodded, and Keith creased his brow into a glare. Beatings he could handle as long as he had to; he was stubborn enough to go for weeks if the need arose, he was sure. No water, on the other hand… “I  _need_  water.”

“Not my problem.”

“Your boss is looking for answers, isn’t he?” Keith bit out. “If I don’t get water, soon enough he’s not going to have anyone around to question.”

The guard, though, looked thoroughly unimpressed. “Then I suppose you’ve got a decision to make, don’t you?”

He turned and left, ignoring the “Hey!” Keith shouted toward his retreating back.

Keith sighed and let his eyes close, the pit of his stomach suddenly heavy as he tried to do the math in his head. How long it would take for word to reach the rest of the team about the raid at the depot he’d been manning, plus how long it would take for them to find out where he’d been taken or to track him, plus how much time they’d need to plan and then execute a rescue, all versus how long he could last without water while hanging bloody and beaten on a wall.

That wasn’t math he could handle. And besides, that only even mattered if a rescue was forthcoming in the first place.

His eyes shot open. Where the hell had  _that_  thought come from? Of course they would plan a rescue. Why wouldn’t they? Well, he supposed he  _had_  been the one to suggest leaving Allura behind with Zarkon, as much as he disliked the thought, and he doubted the other paladins had forgotten it. But that had been different, right? She’d specifically said not to come after her, and it was clear as day that the whole situation was a trap, and that it had been a sheer miracle that Voltron had come out of it intact. This was different.

… Or maybe this was cosmic retribution for his wanting to leave someone else behind for his own safety. That would be fair.

He shivered and tried to dispel those thoughts from his head. No, no, they’d be here, it was just the fatigue and pain talking, making him fear the worst. They were coming. Probably.

And if they were, they’d be here in time. Hopefully.

Keith took a deep, slow breath as he came to the realization that maybe he was going to have to get out of this himself. Every bone in his body screamed at him not to, reminded him that he was in no shape to be attempting any sort of escape, but he might very well not have a choice.

First thing first, he had to get himself off of this goddamned wall.

He pulled his gaze up to his right wrist, the one that wasn’t attached to a broken arm, and blinked blearily to focus on it through the dried blood caked onto his eyelashes. It was coarse rope keeping him strung up to the hook in the wall rather than a metal cuff or manacle, and the harsh fibers had been biting into his wrists all this time, leaving them blistered and raw. It hurt, but it might be to his advantage.

Slowly he pressed his wrist against the wall, testing his range of motion. The rope only had a couple of inches of give, but that may be all he needed. Praying that the rough brick behind him was coarse enough for this to work, he began scraping his wrist along the wall, letting the fibers of the rope catch along the uneven texture of the wall. He sped up gradually, straining to hold himself steady on his one good leg as he rubbed the rope down as if with sandpaper.

After he’d been at it long enough for his wrist to begin cramping, he turned his arm to examine the rope. Even from here, he could see that a number of the fibers of the rope had been eaten through by the friction. If his busted jaw and split lip hadn’t ensured that doing so would be too painful to be worth it, he would have broken out into a broad smile.

No time for celebrating, though. With renewed vigor he began scraping against the wall, the fibers of the rope slowly snapping as others dug into the blisters on his sore wrist. It was a slow process, sure. A couple of times he had to pause when a guard passed by his cell and glanced inside with no more than a fleeting interest, before resuming once they were out of sight.

And, gradually, it paid off. The longer he went, the more quickly the fibers began to break, weakened by the strain of having fewer and fewer to hold his wrist up. It got more painful toward the end, when there wasn’t much rope left, so the skin of his wrist had to scrape against the wall as well, gradually grating down until there were thick rivulets of blood trailing down his arm from where enough layers of skin had been scraped away.

He hadn’t prepared himself, though, for when the last of the fibers finally snapped and his right arm dropped. His body instantly sagged away, and yanked his left arm along with it. He let out a yell of pain, his vision going spotty as he tried to breathe through the sudden agony shooting from his elbow. It was all he could do to stay balanced all the while. Fortunately he hadn’t drawn the attention of any guards. He was certain that someone must have heard the yell, but it seemed if he wasn’t offering surrender, then no sound he made was worth their time.

The pain finally began to ebb away after a few dobashes of breathing deeply, eyes squeezed shut, trying to think about anything at all besides his arm. Not entirely, nowhere near it, but enough that he could focus his eyes again and concentrate on his other wrist.

He wouldn’t have to scrape this one away fiber by fiber. With his right hand free, he could undo the knot. Twisting himself so he could reach the rope was hell on his ribs and chest, but he powered through it, trying to hold his arm as still as possible as he fumbled with the knot.

He readied himself for the fall this time, but that still didn’t make it easy. His leg gave out as the knot came undone, knocking him to the floor with just enough time to angle himself so that he didn’t fall directly onto either his left arm or his right knee, but he couldn’t stop them from folding inward at odd angles, sending out that agony to course through him again. He kept himself from yelling, but he bit down so hard on his lower lip that he tasted iron and soon felt blood trickling down onto his chin; he probably should have just screamed.

Too late now. Now he had to focus on how he intended to escape, since he hadn’t really thought ahead much further than getting his wrists freed from that wall. And he’d get started on planning right away once he stopped feeling like his whole body was on fire. In the meantime, he pressed his face against the cool stone floor of the cell, on the side with the uninjured jaw, and let his eyes fall closed as he waited for the pain to pass.

He hadn’t intended to fall asleep or black out, but he must have, since when he opened his eyes again, the prison was suddenly much noisier seemingly apropos of nothing. He could hear more than one set of stomping footsteps in the distance, as well as the echoes of voices that all blurred together.

Must be bringing in new prisoners, he realized. If there were other cells near him, that meant a guard would be coming by sometime soon. Hastily he put together a plan of action. The bars of the cell wall were far enough apart that Keith could fit his arms through them. If someone came near enough, he could reach them, and he would have the element of surprise on his side since for all anyone else knew he was still stuck dangling from that wall. A guard would have a key on him, or maybe some sort of electronic device to open the cell door, so if he played this right, he could knock him out, retrieve the key, and get out of the cell.

And then there would just be the task of dragging himself however far and past whatever obstacles it took to get out of this prison. While not getting caught. And with a broken kneecap. And while near fainting from pain and blood loss.

Fantastic.

But it wasn’t as if he had the time, the means, or the presence of mind to come up with anything better, so he would just have to take a leap and hope that it didn’t end in total disaster.

After an attempt to stand up from the floor succeeded in nothing but sending pain pulsing through his knee, he decided he would need some support to get to his feet, so he dragged himself along the floor, trying to only use his good arm and leg and jostle his injuries as little as possible, and when he reached the wall, he slowly pulled himself up as he leaned against it, finally positioning himself upright on his left leg.

He paused for a moment to give himself time to catch his breath again after the effort. Once his panting breaths quieted by a notch, he carefully moved along the wall until he was right up against the bars of the cell. A couple of the voices and footfalls, he noticed, had gotten clearer and louder, meaning that they were nearby.

He took a deep breath. He wasn’t ready, not even close to it, but he was only going to grow less ready the longer he hesitated, so now was as good a time as any to execute his escape attempt. “Hey!” he shouted into the empty hallway. “Hey, I yield! I surrender! I’m ready to talk! Please!” He didn’t even have to fake the tired desperation in his voice, which was only exacerbated by his tender jaw.

The footsteps and voices paused, and then the steps started again, faster than before and getting closer. They were coming from the left side of the hall, which was fortunate because Keith was up against the far left end of the wall of bars. About time he got a little taste of good luck.

And hopefully that luck would last him just a little while longer. The moment the bulky figure of a guard passed by his cell, he sprang, shooting his arms out through the bars and ignoring the lightning that burst from the left as he wrapped them around the guard’s neck, yanking him toward him so that they both slammed against the bars.

Even with the surge of adrenaline fueling him, Keith’s injuries meant that he was still much weaker in a fight than he would like to be, and his attempted chokehold appeared to be fairly ineffectual, since the other’s struggling didn’t slow, and he was saying something now, shouting something, as clear as he would without an arm around his throat, although Keith couldn’t quite make out what he was saying over the ringing in his own ears. So he simply growled and brought his left leg up to kick whatever he could reach.

He kept it up as long as he could, gripping and kicking past the bars, until, finally, the other figure’s voice managed to make itself heard past the rushing in his ears. “Keith! Keith, let go!”

Keith. The guards and the chief had only called him either ‘boy’ or ‘paladin’; he was pretty sure they didn’t know his actual name. He paused in his kicks and struggling long enough to force his foggy vision to focus, a he finally noticed the splashes of yellow across what he had assumed had been an Irverian guard.

His grip slackened, and he sank to the ground, landing on his backside, which was a relief as it was probably one of the only parts of him left that wouldn’t be torture to land on. “Hunk?” he cried disbelievingly as he stared up at the other paladin. A fleeting moment of panic overtook him for a quick moment at the sight of crimson streaks of blood around Hunk’s neck and chest, before he realized to his relief that it was just his own.

“Yeah, man. You – God, you don’t look so good. Okay, hang on, stand back.” It must have only been meant as an expression rather than an actual order, since Keith had decided that he was done moving for the day. Hunk backed away, his bayard out, and a moment later the cell was shaking from the blast that had blown straight through the lock on the door and the bars surrounding it. Keith closed his eyes against the pebbles of debris that buffeted off of him.

And next thing he knew, Hunk was behind him, carefully supporting him by his back and shoulders as he strained to stay upright and breathing so he didn’t crash straight to the floor. “Holy  _shit_ , man,” he said softly. “Shit. You look – you – you look like – ”

He didn’t finish, and he didn’t need to. Based on the fact that the sight of him caused  _Hunk_  to slip into swearing, Keith could guess how horrible he must look.

“What the hell happened to you, bud?” Hunk asked.

He took a couple of ragged breaths before answering with a mumble that was more of a croak than a human voice, “Oh, you know me. Got in a fight.”

Hunk laughed. It hadn’t been funny, Keith knew, just one of those moments when you have to laugh because it’s the only thing you can come up with to do. “Damn, Keith. Remind me never to get into a fight with whoever you threw down with.”

He paused, before continuing, “Yeah, I’ve got him. He’s, uh, he’s not good. We’re gonna need a cryopod for him stat.” Keith slowly lifted his eyes to Hunk’s face, confused until he realized that Hunk was speaking into his comm, not to him. “We’re a floor down and down a left from the holding cells… I dunno, I can’t tell if – yeah, he’s still bleeding some. What’s that? Oh, hang on.” He removed his helmet and held it near Keith’s face. “Tell Shiro you’re alive. Seems he doesn’t just want to take my word for it.”

“Hey Shiro,” Keith said. His raspy voice must have been just loud enough for the comm to pick it up, since a faint sigh of relief came through the earpiece, followed by Shiro’s voice.  _“Thank God. Oh, thank God.”_

 _“You should have seen how worried you made Shiro, Keith,”_  came another voice. Although it was a little hard to tell from the electric tinniness of the earpiece several inches away, Keith was pretty sure it was Pidge.  _“When no one from your depot made it to the next checkpoint. You gotta stop landing yourself in danger if you don’t want the rest of his hair going white too.”_

“Sorry,” Keith mumbled.

 _“Don’t be,”_  Shiro said.  _“I’m just glad you’re okay.”_

“Relatively,” Hunk called into the helmet.

_“Right. Still. Glad you’re alive. We’re on our way down, so you and Hunk just hold tight, okay?”_

“Yeah,” Keith replied in that half-whisper. “Thanks – thanks for – for coming.”

 _“Pfft, come on, Mullet.”_  Keith knew instantly that this voice was Lance.  _“Big heroes saving the day is essentially our job description. You didn’t dare doubt us, did you?”_

Keith was silent for a couple of shallow breaths before answering, “No. No, of course not. Not for a moment.”

 _“Can you pass the helmet back to Hunk?”_  Pidge asked.  _“I need directions.”_

Keith wasn’t up for moving his arms, but thankfully Hunk heard it and took the helmet from Keith’s hands, giving him a small, worried smile before putting it back on his head and beginning to speak with Pidge.

As he leaned into Hunk, Keith’s eyes slid closed, all of him completely worn out just from keeping himself up during that little conversation. He was done for now, he decided. The team was coming, they were taking him back to the castle and to a cryopod, he no longer needed to worry. And he was so exhausted that he was pretty sure they could bounce every bruised or broken bit of his body around all the way there and it still wouldn’t be enough to rouse him.

Only one way to find out, he thought, as he closed his eyes and collapsed fully against Hunk, finally letting himself sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> [I tumble.](http://justheretobreakthings.tumblr.com)


End file.
